Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin Payments Go Live At Overstock — Two Quarters Early
New submitter citab writes with news that "the first major retailer is now accepting bitcoins!" In December, Overstock.com announced that they would begin accepting Bitcoin for payment as early as the end of second quarter 2014, but decided to make it a priority task to avoid having someone else beat them to it. From the article: "Last Tuesday, the company struck a deal to handle Bitcoin payments through a service operated by the suddenly hot San Francisco startup Coinbase, and since then, a team of Overstock engineers has worked almost every waking hour to prepare the site for what is undeniably a key moment in the digital currency’s short history. ... [Overstock CEO] Byrne believes this can ultimately boost the company’s bottom line, but that’s not his only aim. For Byrne, a rather opinionated libertarian who’s unafraid to take his company places others fear to tread, embracing the cryptocurrency is as much a political statement as a business decision. Like so many others, he believes Bitcoin can free the world from the control of big banks and big government. 'It helps us fight the machine,' he says."
was Silkroad.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is the big game changer right here. This is what has been holding everything back, up until now. With this policy decision things are really going to take off. Clearly it has been the lack of Bitcoin that has been holding Overstock.com back for all this time.
My understanding is that they provide an easy way to convert your bitcoins to USD during checkout.
They use coinbase which, like bitpay, will convert the btc into usd for the supplier. They will have their usd payment just as quickly as any other payment processor so there is no issue of the price dropping before an item is even prepared for shipping let alone before it is shipped.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
They don't actually accept bitcoins (or quote prices in bitcoins). What they do is offer a 3rd party check-out option. At the time of check out, the amount of USD will be converted to bitcoins according to the rate quoted by 3rd party (coinbase) and buyer would have to send the quoted amount. According to FAQ, quotes are valid for 10 minutes.
This mode of payment conveniently comes with a number of restrictions, in particular any orders paid for in this manner are not refundable in either USD or bitcoin, all buyer can get back is store credit.
More importantly, I don't see what is there to gain for bitcoin users. Privacy afforded by bitcoin is lost here since buyer identity is known to at least two parties - Overstock and Coinbase.
to overthrow the tyranny of the evil payment and banking system, we will adopt a, uh, payment and banking system.
But since the code and infrastructure is less than 6 months old and depends on companies with less cash flow than lolcats.com instead of being crufty 25 year old code from evil companies with billions of evil fiat currency tokens, it's sure to be an awesome libertarian world changer!
In addition to what the Parent said, there is going to be increased stability in BitCoins as the currency gains acceptance. That stability will cause the currency's value to rise as stability increases, to the point where it becomes THE currency people barter for, rather than USD or EURO. At that point, you'll see sudden decrease in value of the other FIAT currencies, and deflationary nature of BitCoin to start happening.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Bitcoin is the Libertarian's Currency!
Taken from his rant:
"Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency". You can visualize it as some kind of scarce precious data resource, sort of a digital equivalent of gold. Nation-states don't control the supply of it, so it promises to bypass central banks. "
Previewing comments are for sissies!
This option is only available for US customers. There's no problem sending US dollars to Overstock. It would be more useful if they exported to China. But then they'd have to deal with inbound customs on the China end.
I guess for some the fact that you don't need to pass a credit check to participate in Bitcoin might be a major advantage.
Are you joking, or did you drink gallons of the bitcoin kool-aid? There's no reason that a single bitcoin should be worth more than $1, much less close to $1,000. It's all based on speculators, rather than any inherent value to bitcoins. Why make early-adopters and the founders of a single crypto-currency wealthy, when we can create new crypto-currencies as needed?
If crypto-currencies catch on, bitcoin will just be one of many, and I expect it to be worth a small fraction of the current bubble price caused by speculators rather than people actually using it as money.
Ah, not entirely true it turns out, I can click a link and go to their non-international version
Many people are interested in bitcoin because of the lack of central bank control and it's non fiat currency nature.
non fiat? Are you saying that bitcoins have intrinsic value?
What privacy to you think bitcoin provides? The government knows the physical address associated with the IP address associated with every bitcoin transaction. OK, sure it may be easier to use a stolen WiFi than a stolen credit card, but that's a pretty slim advantage.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How is bitcoin not a fiat currency? Its supply is determined by algorithm instead of by a central bank, but that's not what "fiat" is about. For that matter, its supply is only controlled until it becomes mainstream - if BTC-denominated savings accounts ("eurobitcoins"), BTC futures, and BTC-denominated insurance policies come into play, the supply will be quite uncontrolled.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If overstock was such a huge believer in bitcoin then they would accept it as a payment method. and NO this is NOT what they are doing, they are still only accepting US dollars, they are just supporting a 3rd party payment method that allows people to convert bitcoins. In exchange for this convenience they lose the ability to get a refund.
No, it means a trusted third party is required to transact in BTC at the moment. There's nothing inherent about bitcoin that means it can be traded for alpaca socks, but not pumpkins. If bitcoin becomes more widely used, it's value will stabilise. If it's value stabilises, it'll become accepted by more merchants, including merchants selling food.
Really, you're just re-iterating the same sentiment Ken Olson did: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home". No, there probably wasn't - then. His failure and yours is that you insist on assuming that the current state of affairs will persist indefinitely into the future. The value of bitcoin isn't what you can do with it now, but what you might be able to do with it in the future.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It's base on offer and demand, there is hundreds of copy/paste of Bitcoin (because it's open source) but none of them have the infrastructure and the acceptance as Bitcoin... that's a good reason why Bitcoin worth more. Also the other alt-coin have even worst "early adopter" holding, for instance Quarks Coin have already 95%+ already mine in a 6 months, while Bitcoin we are at over half in *4* years.
Shouldn't you have gotten some bitcoins when they were $0.30 each, not so long ago?
I would have, but I had already invested all of my retirement money in Flooz, you insensitive clod.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
There's no reason that a single bitcoin should be worth more than $1, much less close to $1,000. It's all based on speculators, rather than any inherent value to bitcoins.
How did you come to the $1 figure? Why not 0.01$ or 1000$? Can you please elaborate?
I just love it when bitcoin posts show up on Slashdot. The circle-jerk of anti-bitcoin butthurt makes me so happy. It's quieting down, though. We've got a major retailer accepting bitcoin, now.
Exactly, i'm also pretty amused by the heavily upvoted anti-bitcoin bullshit in every slashdot bitcoin story. It has been 5 years now? I wonder how long would bitcon need to stay or how widespread it would need to become for slashdot to accept it. Maybe the readers here are just too old and conservative and it will never happen, like most old people will never use internet or smartphones or online-banking. I guess when you are of some age you are too old to learn and endorse new technologies.
Bitcoins don't have an inherent value, they're just numbers. Gold has an inherent value because it can be used for stuff. Bitcoins don't.
If Bitcoin is meant to replace the US Dollar then the total value of all Bitcoins will have to equal the total value of all US Dollars.
There was approximately $1.24 trillion in circulation as of December 25, 2013.
There can be no more than 21 million bitcoins
This puts the value that a bitcoin should have at the time it totally replaces the US Dollar at: 59047.6 US Dollar.
Of course there are issues with this simplification, but it's a nice place to start.
A few months ago, I saw lots of posts ridiculing bitcoin because no major vendors accepted it. Well, now a major vendor accepts it. :) The thing is, none of these arguments have any merit whatsoever. There are problems with bitcoin, but I have never seen anyone on Slashdot know enough about bitcoin to clearly elucidate any of them.
For a site that is so "nerd-centric", Slashdot sure has a lot of uninformed circle-jerkers. Amazing. And amusing.
Anonymity is not a feature of bitcoin transactions or any transactions for that matter, as in order to receive a good you have to give it up at some level to receive that good. The advantage of bitcoin is the lack of central authority, it is an excellent way of transferring funds from country to country without having to go through a bank or physically bringing money across the border. The downside of bitcoin is that it is not backed by anything but the pubic perception of its value so it can be manipulated and is much more unstable because of that.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Which, from an academic perspective, is pretty cool.
Although we're talking about mathematically scarce numbers that have no intrinsic value, so they only have value because we believe they have value. So they're only non-traditional-fiat in the sense that they're scarce, not that they're artificial. That makes them moderately less appealing than a stock share. The currency is designed to deflate infinitely, too, and has a fixed, regressive production rate to a fixed quantity. And the designer is anonymous, which is totally not suspicious. There's no way he has 100,000 personal bitcoins that he's just waiting to sell off as soon as the price hits some ridiculous level. I mean, that would be like a pyramid scheme!
And it's decentralized... by using peer-to-peer networking to track transactions. Yeah, they just give full access to the world database of bitcoin transactions. That's totally not frightening when the database isn't FDIC insured. And as time progresses, the resources the full clients require only increases. Network latency is already a problem. Should the currency really take off, it's going to take a lot of money to operate a Bitcoin node. Well, perhaps some corporate or government interest will run it. But hey, no central bank!
But even assuming none of those problems happens... why should the average individual use it? To replace PayPal? Sure. Everybody hates PayPal. Other than that, I don't get it. I mean, except for scarcity, what's the real difference to me as a consumer between BitCoin and, say, Microsoft Points? Or WoW gold? Why would I work in exchange for BitCoins instead of USD or Euros other than purely political reasons?
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.